From the moment it debuted on April 15, 2012, Lena Dunham’s coming-of-age comedy-drama Girls became a crucial fuel source for the internet’s think-piece-industrial complex, and it kept that machine chugging along for six seasons. As the date of Girls’ finale drew nigh, after an arc that saw Dunham’s heroine, writer Hannah Horvath, getting pregnant and deciding to have the baby, a wary consensus settled in: Whether they love-watched or hate-watched Girls, anyone who’d so much as sampled it wanted to see how it would end. Right after the finale, in which Hannah had maturity foisted upon her, the recaps and cultural thumb-suckers began to appear. Everyone had their say. And then: crickets.
Read More
0 Comments
Orange Is the New Black seemed to dig itself into a narrative hole at the end of season four with the brutal death of one of its most beloved characters, Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), in a jailhouse dustup that echoed subjects of Black Lives Matter protests (the choking death of Eric Garner in particular). It was an event so harrowing that it pulverized the show’s delicate balance of social criticism, inspirational empowerment subplots, and R-rated sitcom tomfoolery. Where could Orange possibly go after such an emotional catastrophe?
Read More The Carmichael Show, Jerrod Carmichael’s refreshingly old-school NBC sitcom, returns for a third season tonight, and what a pleasure it is to see the cast and crew settling into such a confident groove. The series is a hot-button comedy strongly modeled on the collected works of Norman Lear (All in the Family, Good Times, Maude, The Jeffersons). Carmichael is too young to have watched any of these programs during their original airings; he discovered them in repeats and became fascinated with them because, during his own childhood in the ’90s, network sitcoms had largely moved away from the sort of topic-driven, let’s-fight-it-out material that Lear and his collaborators specialized in.
Read More |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories
All
|